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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Henry Joseph Darger, Jr. (April 12(?), 1892–April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a janitor in Chicago, Illinois.^[1] He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.^[2] Darger's work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.

Contents 1 Life 2 In the Realms of the Unreal 3 Darger's mental health 4 Last years 5 Posthumous fame and influence 6 Darger in popular culture 7 Collections and exhibits 7.1 Selected public collections 7.2 Selected solo exhibits 7.3 Selected group exhibits 8 References 9 Sources 10 External links

[edit] Life

Darger was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1892. While he is believed to have been born on April 12, the exact date is debated. A record exists of his U.S. draft registration card, filled out on June 2, 1917 during the the First World War, which lists his birth date as April 17, 1892.^[3]

Cook County records show that he was born at his home, located at 350 W. 24th Street in Chicago. When he was four years old, his mother, Rosa Fullman, died after having given birth to a daughter, who was given up for adoption; Henry Darger never knew his sister. Darger's biographer, the art historian and psychologist John M. MacGregor, discovered that Rose had had two children before Henry, but their whereabouts are unknown.^[4]

By Darger's own report, his father, Henry Sr., was kind and reassuring to him, and they lived together until 1900. In that year, the crippled and impoverished Darger Sr. had to be taken to live at St. Augustine's Catholic Mission home and his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home. Darger Sr. died in 1905, and his son was institutionalized in Lincoln, Illinois, with the diagnosis, according to Stephen Prokopoff, that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right place." According to John MacGregor, the diagnosis was actually "self-abuse," which A. M. Holmes takes as a euphemism for masturbation, rather than as meaning self-injury.

Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a smart-aleck as a result, which often left him beaten by nuns. He also went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises (akin to Tourette Syndrome), which irritated others. The Lincoln asylum's practices included forced labor and severe punishments, which Darger seems to have worked into In the Realms of the Unreal. He later said that, to be fair, there were also good times there, he enjoyed some of the work, and he had friends as well as enemies. While he was there, he received word that his father had died. A series of attempted escapes ended successfully in 1908. According to his autobiography, he walked back to Chicago from the asylum for "feeble-minded children" in Lincoln, and it was on this journey that he witnessed a huge tornado that devastated the central Illinois area. He described it as "a wind convulsion of nature tremendous beyond all man's conception".^[5][6] There was a tornado that hit the eastern edge of Tampico, Illinois, on Wednesday, November 25, 1908, at 7 p.m. Many barns, windmills and out buildings were turned over, smashed and demolished. Dwellings suffered a small amount of damage. No one was injured and no livestock killed.^[7] Tampico is located about 40 miles east-northeast of Moline and approximately 110 miles west of Chicago and 125 miles due north of Lincoln.

The 16-year old returned to Chicago and, with the help of his godmother, found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself until his retirement in 1963.

Except for a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I, his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended Catholic Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services; he collected and saved a bewildering array of trash from the streets. His dress was shabby although he attempted to keep his clothes clean and mended. He was largely solitary; his one close friend, William Shloder, was of like mind with Darger on the subject of protecting abused and neglected children, and the pair proposed founding a "Children's Protective Society," which would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Shloder left Chicago sometime in the mid-1930s, but he and Darger stayed in touch through letters until Shloder's death in 1959.

In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's North Side, at 851 W. Webster Avenue, in the Lincoln Park section of the city, near the DePaul University campus. It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in 1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was discovered.

Darger's landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death, a day after his birthday, on April 13, 1973. Nathan Lerner, an accomplished photographer whose long career the New York Times wrote "was inextricably bound up in the history of visual culture in Chicago",^[8] recognized immediately the artistic merit of Darger's work.

By this time Darger was in the Catholic mission, St. Augustine's, where his father had died, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Lerners took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger has become internationally recognized thanks to the efforts of the people he knew to save his works. After Nathan Lerner's death in 1997, Kiyoko Lerner became the sole figure in charge of both her husband and Darger's estates. The U.S. copyright representative for Estate of Henry Darger and the Estate of Nathan Lerner is the Artists Rights Society.^[9]

Darger is buried in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois, in a plot called "The Old People of the Little Sisters of the Poor Plot." Darger's modest headstone is inscribed "Artist" and "Protector of Children."^[10]

[edit] In the Realms of the Unreal

Darger's work contains many religious themes, albeit handled extremely idiosyncratically. In the Realms of the Unreal postulates a large planet around which Earth orbits as a moon and where most people are Christian (mostly Catholic). The majority of the story concerns the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven sisters who are princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia and who assist a daring rebellion against the evil John Manley's regime of child slavery imposed by the Glandelinians. The latter resemble Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War. (Darger, like his father, was a Civil War expert.) Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology also includes a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short), gigantic winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human form, even disguising themselves as children. They are usually (but not always) benevolent; some Blengins are extremely suspicious of all humans, due to Glandelinian atrocities.

In the Realms of the Unreal includes The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, and extends over 15 immense, densely-typed volumes of 15,145 total pages. The text is accompanied by three bound volumes of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper, the work of six decades, derived from magazines and coloring books. In addition, Darger wrote an eight volume, 5,084-page autobiography, The History of my Life; a 10-year daily weather journal; assorted diaries; and a second work of fiction, provisionally entitled Crazy House, of over 10,000 handwritten pages.

Once free of the asylum, Darger tried to begin the process of reconstructing his shattered family life. He attempted to adopt a child, but his repeated efforts failed. Searching for the child he was denied in reality, he found richly symbolic substitutes in newspaper clippings, particularly a portrait from the Chicago Daily News from May 9, 1911 -- a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek, who apparently wandered away from her home on April 8 and was kidnapped and strangled. Her body was found a month later in a sanitary district channel near the screen guards of the powerhouse at Lockport, Illinois. ^[11]

This newspaper photo was part of a growing personal archive of clippings Darger had been gathering. There is no indication that the murder or the news photo and article had any particular significance for Darger, until one day he could not find it among his personal effects. Writing in his journal at the time, he began to process this forfeiture of yet another child, lamenting that "the huge disaster and calamity" of his loss "will never be atoned for," but "shall be avenged to the uttermost limit."^[12]

According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. Because he couldn't remember the exact date of its publication, he couldn't locate it in the newspaper archive. Instead of doing further research, he began an elaborate series of novenas and other prayers to God for the picture to be returned or replaced.

The fictive war that was sparked by Darger's loss of the newspaper photograph of the strangled girl, whose murderer was never found,^[13] became Darger's lifetime magnum opus. He had been working on some version of the novel before this time (he makes reference to an early draft which was also lost or stolen), but now it became an all-consuming creation.

In The Realms of the Unreal, the "assassination of the child labor rebel Annie Aronburg . . . was the most shocking child murder ever caused by the Glandelinian Government," and was the cause of the war. Through their sufferings, valiant deeds and exemplary holiness, the Vivian Girls are hoped to be able to help bring about a triumph of Christianity. Darger provided two endings to the story: In one, the Vivian Girls and Christianity are triumphant; in the other, they are defeated and the godless Glandelinians reign.

Darger's human figures were rendered largely by tracing, collage, or photo enlargement from popular magazines and children's books. (Much of the "trash" he collected was old magazines and newspapers, which he clipped for source material.) Some of his favorite figures were the Coppertone Girl and Little Annie Rooney. He is praised for his natural gift for composition and the brilliant use of color in his watercolors. The images of daring escapes, mighty battles, and painful torture are reminiscent not only of epic films such as Birth of a Nation (which Darger might easily have seen) but of events in Catholic history; the text makes it clear that the child victims are heroic martyrs like the early saints. One idiosyncratic feature of Darger's artwork is an apparent transgenderism: Characters are often portrayed unclothed or partially clothed, and regardless of ostensible gender, some females have penises. Some feel Darger was unfamiliar with female anatomy, that he meant it as a symbol of power (a chapter of In the Realms of the Unreal includes an articulate rant on the ability of girls to accomplish as much as boys), or that he modeled the girls after images of the infant Jesus.

[edit] Darger's mental health

Much modern fascination with Darger concerns his portrayal of horrific brutality displayed against children.

Darger understood something of the nature of his devastated upbringing. In a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence, he wrote of children's right "to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart."^[4]

Some people who knew him speculated that Darger may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. However, despite Darger's unusual lifestyle, infantilism and strange behavior, he has not generally been considered insane. In the biographical film about him, this topic is addressed, and Darger, while certainly described as eccentric, is also mentioned to be "in complete control of his life". MacGregor, in the appendix to his book on Darger, speculates that the most fitting diagnosis is autism, of an Asperger syndrome type.

He mourned life itself. In the last entry in his diary, before his April 1973 death, he wrote: "January 1, 1971. I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now.... I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel should be how I am. ..."^[4]

[edit] Last years

In 1968, Darger became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood. It was in this year that he wrote The History of My Life, a book that spends 206 pages detailing his early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a huge twister called "Sweetie Pie," probably based on memories of the tornado he had witnessed in 1908. He also kept a diary to chronicle the weather and his daily activities. Darger often concerned himself with the plight of abused and neglected children; the institution where he had lived as a boy was brought under investigation in a huge scandal shortly before he left ^[14][15] and he might have seen victims of child abuse in the hospital where he worked.

A second work of fiction, provisionally entitled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, contains over 10,000 handwritten pages. Written after The Realms, it takes that epic's major characters—the seven Vivian sisters and their companion/secret brother, Penrod—and places them in Chicago, with the action unfolding during the same years as that of the earlier book. Begun in 1939, it is a tale of a house that is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, or has an evil consciousness of its own. Children disappear into the house and are later found brutally murdered. The Vivians and a male friend are sent to investigate and discover that the murders are the work of evil ghosts. The girls go about exorcising the place, but have to resort to arranging for a full-scale Holy Mass to be held in each room before the house is clean.

[edit] Posthumous fame and influence

Darger is one of the most famous figures in the history of outsider art. At the Outsider Art Fair, held every January in New York City, and at auction, his work is among the highest-priced of any self-taught artist. The American Folk Art Museum, New York City, opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001.^[16] His work commands upward of $80,000 and his room is re-created at a new permanent exhibition at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, a Chicago gallery.^[17][18]

A 2008 exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum, titled "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger," examined the influence of Darger's oeuvre on eleven artists, including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robyn O'Neil, and Amy Cutler, who were responding not only to the aesthetic nature of Darger's mythic work -- with its tales of good versus evil, its epic scope and complexity, and its transgressive undertone -- but also to his driven work ethic and all-consuming devotion to artmaking.^[16]

[edit] Darger in popular culture

Since his death in 1973 and the discovery of his massive opus, and especially since the 1990s, there have been many references in popular culture to Darger's work—references by other visual artists (including, but not limited to, artists of comics and graphic novels); numerous songs by artists from Snakefinger (one of the earliest, in 1979) to Natalie Merchant (on her 2001 album Motherland); a 1999 book-length poem, Girls on the Run, by John Ashbery; and a 2004 multimedia piece by choreographer Pat Graney incorporating Darger images. These artists have variously drawn from and responded to Darger's artistic style, his themes (especially the Vivian Girls, the young heroines of Darger's massive illustrated novel), and the events in his life. Jessica Yu's 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal details Darger's life and artworks. Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up include a track entitled "Vivian Girls" on the 2006 album Hidden World, the lyrics of which deal with the violent plot and the nature of Darger's fixation on the virginal main characters.^{[citation needed]} The all-girl indie/punk/shoegaze band from Brooklyn, NY called "The Vivian Girls" is also an apparent reference to Darger's work. Walker Kong also has a song entitled "Vivian Girls".

The Vivian Girls were also namechecked by San Francisco guitarist Snakefinger (Philip Lithman Roth), an associate of the Residents, in his song "The Vivian Girls." The song was also recorded by Camper Van Beethoven offshoot Monks of Doom on their 1989 LP The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company.

Sufjan Stevens released a song titled "The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies" on his 2006 compilation album The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album.

Darger is mentioned in the song "Placentapede" by From Autumn to Ashes.

Indie rock band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have a song titled "Segue: In the Realms of the Unreal" on their 2006 album So Divided.

Neil Gaiman also references Darger's work in a story contained in a Sandman collection, Endless Nights. In the episode called "Going Inside", one of the characters, an old man, is writing and illustrating a mammoth project that resembles Darger's work very closely in the loneliness of his own house. However, the reference has to be considered inspirational rather than factual, as fictional details, such as the man punishing himself for not having written enough pages per day, are installed into the character's story.

Philadelphia duo The Vivian Girls Experience take their name and image from Darger's work.

Indie band Tilly and the Wall have a song titled "Lost Girls" which was inspired by Darger's work.

Artist/activist Paul Chan created an artwork in 2003 entitled "Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization--After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier"

The band formerly known as Mazarin (now called Black Stoltzfus) has a song called "Henry Darger".

Chicago theatre company Dog And Pony created and produced an original work, entitled "As Told By The Vivian Girls," based on In The Realms Of The Unreal, and performed it at Theatre on the Lake, a theatre in the same neighborhood as Darger's Chicago studio apartment.

Lo-fi folk singer/songwriter Kate Ferencz of Brooklyn, New York, has written and recorded a song called "Elsie Paroubek," after the girl who inspired Darger's main work.^[19]

Jesse Kellerman's 2008 novel The Genius took part of its inspiration from Darger's story.

The artist Grayson Perry cites Darger as "the artist he identifies most with in terms of his creative pathways," and his influence can clearly be seen in Perry's use of visual language.

Comic book artist Scott McCloud refers to Darger's work in his book Making Comics, while describing the danger artists encounter in the creation of a character's back-story. McCloud says that complicated narratives can easily spin out of control when too much unseen information is built up around the characters.

In her coffee table book, Influence, Mary-Kate Olsen cited Darger as one of her favorite artists.

The Simpsons references Darger in the episode, Lisa the Drama Queen. Lisa Simpson goes to the American Folk Art Museum and a Darger painting can be seen.

The metalcore band Haste the Day bases their video "Mad Man" on some of Darger's art.

[edit] Collections and exhibits

Darger’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne), the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Darger’s art also has been featured in many notable museum exhibitions, including “The Unreality of Being,” curated by Stephen Prokopoff (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1996; Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1997). It was also seen in “Disasters of War” (P.S. 1, New York, 2000), where it was presented alongside works by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya and the British contemporary-art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman. Earlier this year, an entire gallery was devoted to Darger’s drawings in “Dubuffet and Art Brut” at the Museum Kunst Palast, in Düsseldorf; that exhibition will open at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Lille-Métropole on October 10 (and run through February 1, 2006). Darger’s work has also been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and the Collection de l’Art Brut. Darger’s art has also been featured in exhibitions at La Maison Rouge (Paris) and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco).

[edit] Selected public collections

• Museum of Modern Art (New York)
• American Folk Art Museum (New York)
• Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne)
• New Orleans Museum of Art
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago)
• Milwaukee Art Museum
• Walker Art Center (Minneapolis)
• Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin)
• National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian, Washington D.C.)
• High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA)
• Musée d'art moderne de Lille Metropole (Villeneuve d'Ascq)

[edit] Selected solo exhibits

2008

• Up Close: Henry Darger, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY
• Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY
• Darger Discoveries, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, NY

2007

• Henry Darger : A Story of Girls at War, of Paradises Dreamed, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
• Henry Darger: The Vivian Girls Emerge, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, NY

2006

• Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art Museum, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, and Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
• Bruit et fureur: L’œuvre de Henry Darger (Sound and Fury: The Art of Henry Darger), La maison rouge, Paris

2004

• Andererseits: Die Phantastik, Landesgalerie am Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria
• Henry Darger, Galerie St. Etienne, New York, NY

2003

• Visions Realized: The Paintings and Process of Henry Darger, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago, IL
• Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

2002

• Darger: The Henry Darger Collection, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY
• Studies and Sketches: Henry Darger, Eva and Morris Feld Gallery, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY

2001

• Disasters of War, P.S.1/MoMA, New York, NY

2000

• Henry Darger: Realms of the Unreal, Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago, IL

1999

• Henry Darger and His Realms, Galerie St. Etienne New York, NY

1996–98

• Henry Darger: The Unreality of Being, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA, Museum of American Folk
• Art, New York, NY, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Chicago Public Library, Chicago , IL, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA

1996

• Dans les Royaumes del'Irréel, Collection de l'art brut and other venues Lausanne, Switzerland
• Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

1987

• Henry Darger, Rosa Esman Gallery, New York, NY
• Henry Darger, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, NY

1982

• Henry Darger: Realms of the Unreal, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, NY

1980

• The Drawings of Henry Darger, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, NY

1977

• The Realms of the Unreal, Hyde Park Art Center Chicago, IL

[edit] Selected group exhibits

2008

• Glossolalia, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

2007

• Effigies, Stuart Shave Modern Art, London, UK (9/7 - 10/4)
• The Writer's Brush, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY (9/11-10/27)
• Art Brussels Contemporary Art Fair, Andrew Edlin Gallery

2006–2007

• A Secret Service, (Hayward Gallery Touring Project, London), Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK,
• Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, UK
• Into Me/Out Of Me, P.S. 1 /MoMA, New York, NY , KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin
• Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection, Tate Britain, London
• Inner Worlds Outside, Fundacion La Caixa, Madrid, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

2005

• Realms of Creation: Wölfli & Darger, Side by Side, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, NY
• Mixed-Up Childhood, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland

2003

• Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA
• Art Brut, Neuve Invention and Outsider Art, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Miami Beach, FL

2002

• Cathy Wilkes - Henry J. Darger, Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
• Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, NSW

2001

• The First 10 Years: Selected Works from the Collection, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

1999

• The Modern Child, Galerie St. Etienne, New York, NY

1998–1999

• Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology, (A traveling exhibit including nine Darger pieces)
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
• Amon Carter Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
• Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, NY
• Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

1996

• Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

1995

• A World of Their Own, Twentieth Century American Folk Art, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ

1992

• Parallel Visions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Museo Nacional Reina *Sofía, Madrid, Kunsthalle
• Basel, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo

1981

• Transmitters: The Isolate Artist in America, Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia, PA

1979

• Outsider Art in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL
• Outsiders, Arts Council of Great Britain, Hayward Gallery, London

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Anderson, Brooke Davis. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: American Folk Art Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.
• Ashbery, John. Girls on the Run: A Poem. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Bonesteel, Michael (ed.). Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.
• Bourrit, Bernard. Henry Darger: Espace mouvant. In "La Part de l'Oeil" n° 20, Bruxelles, 2005: 252–259.
• Collins, Paul, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ISBN 1582343675
• Jones, Finn-Olaf, "Landlord's Fantasy," Forbes, April 25, 2005.
• Kitajima, Keizo (photographs), and Koide, Yukiko and Tsuzukimota, Kyoichi (text), Henry Darger's Room: 851 Webster. Tokyo, Japan: Imperial Press, 2007.
• MacGregor, John M. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. New York: Delano Greenridge Editions, 2002. ISBN 0929445155.
• Morrison, C. L. The Old Man in the Polka-Dotted Dress: Looking for Henry Darger. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Schjeldahl, Peter. Folks, The New Yorker, January 14, 2002: 88–89.
• Peter Schjeldahl's illustrated review of an exhibit of Darger's art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.
• Review (unsigned) of "Henry Darger: Desperate and Terrible Questions," The Outsider.
• Shaw, Lytle, The Moral Storm: Henry Darger's "Book of Weather Reports", Cabinet. An examination of Darger's 10-year weather diaries and their relation to his work and to Christian painting.
• Perry, Grayson, and Jones, Wendy, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Vintage, 2007. ISBN 9780099485162.

[edit] External links

• Henry Darger at the Internet Movie Database
• Stephen Romano • Private Art Dealer: HenryJDarger.com. This site contains many images of Darger's work and links to other Darger-related sites and has Darger work available for sale.
• Art work by Henry Darger
• "Henry Darger's Room 851 Webster"
• Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Website of Chicago art center that features Henry Darger Room Collection on permanent display.
• American Folk Art Museum official website
• Sara Ayers' Henry Darger Page
• Carl Hammer Gallery page, includes a lot of illustrations
• In the Realms of the Unreal, a 2004 documentary about Henry Darger directed by Jessica Yu. (IMDB page, PBS page)
• Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago Summary and analysis of Crazy House by John MacGregor, exemplifying MacGregor's beliefs about Darger's psychology.
• Detailed review of two key Darger books including an analysis of MacGregor's speculations about Darger's psychology. Photo of Darger's workspace.
• In The Realms of the Unreal on Soundclick, an album by Burton Wagner based on Henry Darger's work.
• Andrew Edlin Gallery NYC Gallery representing the estate of Henry Darger
• Nathaniel Rich on Darger for The New Republic
• Henry Darger's grave on Findagrave.com